Governments (local or federal) as well as companies often attempt to evaluate potential vendors or suppliers in order to determine whether business should be conducted with these vendors or suppliers. Currently, vendors or suppliers are provided with a standard list of multiple-choice questions (e.g., answer “A” if you strongly agree; “B” if you agree; “C” if you disagree” and “D” if you strongly disagree”) relating to their business practices, ability to provide the goods or services and so forth. Each answer may be assigned a value. The values associated with all the answers may be added and compared to a threshold value. If the summed values exceed the threshold value, then it may be deemed suitable to conduct business with the vendor. Otherwise, it may be deemed unsuitable to conduct business with the vendor.
However, evaluating vendors based on a limited set of questions that are subject to human interpretation and evaluation is limiting and leads to inaccurate assessments. There are many factors that may be used in evaluating a vendor, such as the product or service costs, scheduling, quality, environmental impact, ability to sustain common business practices and so forth that may not be incorporated in the current evaluation method. Further, by using these standard forms for all vendors in various contexts (e.g., one vendor may be providing trash pickup; whereas, another vendor may be supplying semiconductor chips), these forms do not effectively evaluate the vendor based on the acquisition context (i.e., the context surrounding the products or services provided by the entity).
Further, the current evaluation method relies upon human decision-makers which are inherently subjective and cannot fully incorporate multiple factors in accessing the “suitability” of a vendor. Additionally, when one attempts to evaluate tens of thousands of vendors using the current evaluation method, the task becomes unmanageable.
Therefore, there is a need in the art for evaluating the suitability of an entity to provide products or services without the reliance of human decision makers. Further, the suitability of an entity needs to be evaluated based on the acquisition context that includes all the relevant factors.